data storage location

On Sat, 13 Sep 2003, John Hearns wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 hanzl at noel.feld.cvut.cz wrote:
>> >
> > Cache-like behavior would save a lot of manual work but unfortunately
> > I am not aware of any working solution for linux, I want something
> > like cachefs (nonexistent for linux) or caching ability of AFS/Coda
> > (too cumbersome for cluster) or theoretical features of
> Why do you say AFS is too cumbersome?
> I'm just saying that to provoke a debate - I've never actually set up
> an AFS infrastructure from scratch (kerberos, kernel patches etc...)
> but I know its not an afternoon's work.
> I have had call to work closely with AFS, doing a bit of performance
> tuning for caches etc.
AFS is in wide use at Duke (it is the basis of the students' globally
shared home directory system on campus). It is doable administratively,
although as you note it isn't an afternoon's work. However, it isn't
likely to be a really good cluster fs. Reasons:
a) It is even less efficient and more resource intensive than NFS
(unsurprising, as it does more)
b) It can (unless you take care with e.g. kerberos tickets) produce
"odd" and undesirable behavior such as losing the ability to write to a
file you are holding open after x hours unless/until you
re-authenticate, blocking the process that owns the open file
c) Its caching behavior is insane and (in my opinion) unreliable, at
least as of the last time I tried it. By this I mean that I have
directly experienced the following AFS bug/feature:
System A opens file output in AFS directory
System A writes lots of stuff into output
System A fflushes and keeps running, output is still open
System B wants to graze the current contents of output, so it opens
output for reading.
What does system B find? According to standard/reliable programming
conventions, the use of fflush should force a write of all cached data
back to the file. AFS, however, only flushes the data (apparently) back
to its LOCAL cache/image of the file on system A, and only resync's with
the global image when the file is closed. So System B will read nothing
of what System A has written until A closes the file.
So sure, system A could close and open the file repeatedly, but this
adds a lot of overhead as open/close is expensive (open requires a full
stat, checking permissions, etc.).
Most of this is manageable and one can learn how to work with the system
in a cluster environment for at least certain classes of task, but it is
(as the man says:-) "cumbersome", as to a certain extent is
administration (file acls are more powerful but also require more
thought and human energy, etc). Too cumbersome is up to personal
judgement. Many clusters use a user filesystem only to launch tasks and
permit a single results file to eventually be written back -- "anything"
can be made to work there, and AFS would work as well as NFS or
whatever. Other cluster tasks might well be unsuitable as in my system
A/B example, although with foreknowledge this can be coped with.
Hope this helps. I personally no longer use AFS so perhaps the fflush
"bug" has been fixed, and we have/do/are still meditating upon using AFS
(since we have it running) in at least some capacity on a public cluster
we're engineering, but it isn't a knee-jerk thing to do EVEN if it is
already there, and will definitely require a bit of consideration if you
have to set it up from scratch to use it at all.
rgb
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--
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb at phy.duke.edu
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